Being a Prog slog and a Meg trek

Monthly Archives: May 2015

I’m working on producing a spreadsheet to help me with keeping my reading order (obviously Starlord and Tornado are cover dated, but with things like specials and annuals I’ll need to keep track of when in the year they were released).

The following spreadsheet won’t be helping in any way to achieve that aim, but as I go along I’ll update the 2000AD Wikia, so it’ll be useful to know how many episodes are left in a storyline, and what precedes and follows. To that end I’ve created a one-tab spreadsheet of every story that appeared in Tornado in its short life:

Like this:

In 1983 I was introduced to 2000ad. In that year I was given a handful of progs from the previous weeks and months and not long after I bought my first prog. For some reason I didn’t get the next one, but about a month later I was a regular reader, and have been ever since.

Once upon a time, before the world of work, I would regularly re-read the progs and stories, but at some point in the nineties (the dark days) I stopped re-reading quite so frequently. This was partly due to less free time, but it has to be said also due to the declining quality of the comics at the time.

Inspired by the prog slogs that others have undertaken I’m going to start my own re-read. There are various reasons for me to do this:

to make sure that I actually do something with all those comics I’ve spent so much money and use so much space for

to finally fill in those little gaps in my collection I’ve been meaning to fill

because there are some really good stories that I just haven’t re-read for many, many years

to rediscover stories I’d forgotten (the good and the bad)

so that when the lesser-known old characters get dropped in to new stories I actually know who they all are (it seems I wasn’t the only one not to recognise the Lawlords when they made a recent re-appearance)!

Next, logistics. A quick web search suggests it will take about a year to read 500 progs (one read of 900 progs took two years, while a more recent one took four years to read all progs up to that date).

the novels (from Virgin and Abaddon – I have quite a few gaps in the Abaddon books)

The Daily Dredds

the films and audio plays

I need firstly to put all my progs in order (various house moves across the country, including rescuing progs from damp boxes and not having time to do so in an orderly fashion mean they’re pretty fragmented at the moment). I’m going to need to work out what order they came out in, so that I’ve bit a bit of lead time on the next task: filling in the few gaps. The first of these will be relatively early on, with the Tornados while the only other major gap is around the mid-nineties when the release of the film we rarely talk about coincided with distribution problems. I also had a bunch of Megs stolen, which I’ve only partially replaced so far. Due to these reasons I’m not going to start straight away. Anyway, we’re at the beginning of Summer – I’ll at least wait until Autumn before I spend all my spare time inside reading!

Once I get all this underway, I’ll be making regular posts to this blog, and updating the following thread on the2000AD Online Forums.